Silicon Valley-based CloudVelocity has emerged from stealth mode with $5 million in investment and a technology that aims to remove the barriers of adoption to public clouds.

The $5 million first-round was led by Mayfield Fund. Navin Chaddha, Mayfield’s managing director, said the firm made the decision to invest as the technology is a “major breakthrough.” He explained that the core innovation is that companies can “rent infrastructure from a public cloud but make it look like your own data center.” Chaddha told me the product was developed ahead of schedule, and beta users include a diverse range of midsize and large companies.

CloudVelocity makes it easier for enterprise customers to migrate business applications that are stored on-premise to any public cloud whether it’s Rackspace, Windows Azure or Amazon Web Services. Its still early days, but it’s launching its beta with an AWS-integration.

“[We are] automatically extending the data center to the cloud,” said Rajeev Chawla, the company’s CEO. Prior to cofounding the company, Chawla was an entrepreneur-in-residence at Mayfield Fund and an engineer at Sun Microsystems.

CloudVelocity also offers cloud cloning, which enables developers and application managers to launch duplicate apps for development or test purposes. If the primary site is down, applications are automatically moved to the cloud. If the cloud application fails, an administrator is alerted, and it shifts to another cloud instance.

One of the first customers on the beta said that the technology helped them “substantially reduce our expenses.” Nitin Shingate, the VP of engineering for Lealta Media, said the trial worked so well that they are using it ahead of schedule in their production environment for cloud failover.

“This will help ensure that our online business stays available within the AWS cloud,” said Shingate.

The startup is taking on VMware, which provides a hybrid cloud software that enables companies to move to the public clouds that use VMware. “But it’s VMware to VMware,” Chaddha explained. CloudVelocity hopes to appeal to enterprise customers with its cloud-agonistic approach.